Has died Patxo Unzueta, zen master of opinion journalism. Before this genre, which now seems within everyone’s reach, was torn and torn, practiced by those who consider that giving an opinion is not part of knowledge, he demonstrated in his articles in ‘El País’ that one can only give an opinion knowing .
He arrived at the newspaper of Miguel Yuste shortly after the newspaper was inaugurated, which was born in 1976. With him he came from the Basque Country Jesus Ceberiuswho would later be its director, and both were part of a group of Basque journalists, informers, reporters, part of the legend of good journalism, created in the difficulty of counting and in the obligation to analyze before telling the news or issuing opinions.
Patxo, hardened in the Basque war of Francoism and post-Francoism, had the obligation to think to say, well nothing that happened in the Euskadi of ETA and hypernationalism was alien to him. In that complexity he was educated, and transferred what he knew in an elegant and subtle, clear prose, which was immediately coupled to the way of saying, in his editorials, of his friend Javier Pradera, the first editorialist of the newspaper directed by Juan Luis Cebrián . A serious disagreement over the newspaper’s positions regarding Spain’s membership in NATO ended that close collaboration, which was resumed without Pradera as an editorialist.
Patxo’s work he was as thorough as his character as a columnist. He went to all the editorial discussion sessions, took notes as if he were going to write a memorandum, and the result of those notes were later editorials that he swallowed in all formats. He wrote by hand, submitted that text to the scrutiny of the typewriter, until he felt satisfied, and then he rewrote as if there were still doubts that he resolved, finally, crushing the evidence.
His colleagues (among whom I had the privilege of counting myself) tell anecdotes about him that explain traces of his way of being as an analyst, but also as a person. Any question that was raised to him, journalistic, political or personal, required him a detailed reflection that could take hours and even days to elucidate. In those cases, he took with him, home if necessary, the substance of the matter in question, and returned to the newsroom with a response that sometimes filled several pages, which he left on the table of the curious.
Related news
His silence was one of his legends based on the reality of his character. Once I needed a response from you about something that was being discussed in the Opinion section for which we worked. So I decided to call him on the phone, when he was in the newsroom. Put on the phone, he answered at length as if we had never spoken in person before. From then on, we were always better conversationalists on the phone.
He was a friend touching, always available (by phone, no doubt), with an exciting personal treatment, especially the one he gave until his death to his friend Javier Pradera, whom he went to visit every morning, in the office he always kept there once he returned to ‘El País’ . His conversation was like those that are said to Samuel Beckett he had with his best friends: a string full of fruitful silences. Now they are both in the silence from which they do not return, their story was that of an unswerving friendship around a trade in which noise often turns into useless fury. Patxo was a Zen master of silence and a friend whose silence so many times left me in awe and, like now, speechless.